Links from longer form, evergreen content (a 1,000+ word article that’s been popular for a long time) will be higher value than short, news-based posts. Although the role of keywords in SEO has changed greatly since the early days of search, with the evolution of long-tail keywords and natural language search, the humble keyword is still one of the fundamental building blocks of search optimization, and an important Google ranking signal. It is worth noting that when it comes to link building, it is very difficult to find a site owner willing to give you a link freely. Usually you give something back in return. When you've selected your focus keyword, ensure it is found in your title tag, h1 tag, meta description, article text and make sure that relevant keywords are also be found throughout the content as well as h2 tags.

Backlinks just to your homepage

Don’t just stuff your keywords in willy-nilly and then tack on your city and state (or region or county) at the end. Remember that in addition to conveying to Google the terms for which you want your business to be relevant, these are the phrases that your prospective customers will see when they’re searching. As you create content for your website, link to other pages on your site within your content. Use anchor text that uses the page’s target keywords or phrases that explain what the page is about. Always use no follow if you have linked your site with another site which is not of your niche. Google will be very careful and can take a step of getting you deindexed if he feels anything fishy. Google does not wants its search results to suffer and hence takes this kind of steps. t’s not necessarily bad to optimize for traffic, it depends on your goals; if you’re in e-commerce or a service based business it is more valuable to invest your resources in making sure you rank well for the terms that are most likely to lead to a sale; optimize for conversion, not just to gain the visitor.

Determining Relevance in Link Building

Links still matter. We should just think of them differently. Consider whether the links you attract will actually drive qualified traffic to your site, rather than just adding to antiquated metrics like external link volume. A proximity search uses the order of the search phrase to find related documents. Be Yourself. Write about what you know and
make it a conversation with your readers. Keep it natural.
People will find your content because they speak the same
language and seek your advice. You don't necessarily need a large social media presence, just an active one. The more you engage with the local community by responding to comments and questions, the more your Facebook, Google+, Twitter and other social profiles are likely to appear in local searches.

Think about Long Tail Keywords

Some of the first things you probably think of with regards to SEO are links. Links are good. We need lots of links to our site, and to our pages, to be successful. This is part of Authority, that sneaky third aspect of SEO. To add to your understanding of links, internal links (or links from your own website) are also incredibly important. They’re how we pass our website’s authority around. And those super nav links? They create links from every single page on the site, to every single other page on the site. Backlinks are the foundation to Google’s algorithm. Once you have a good site structure in place, you need to focus on acquiring backlinks. It’s not as easy to make a site easy to crawl as you might desire. There is an immense difference between a 10-page Website and a 10,000,000-page Website. The search engine will determine how many pages it crawls and how often it crawls each page. The SEO specialist’s job is to give the search engine as many reasons to crawl a page as possible. In other words, search engine optimization works by managing and improving crawl. Gaz Hall, a Freelance SEO Consultant, commented: "Old-school SEO focused on keywords. New-school SEO focuses on high click-through rates, “long clicks”, freshness, and amplification...which are all signals that users are successfully finding the answers they’re looking for in your content."

Have a category description paragraph

If you execute your keyword research properly, you’ll end up with a long list of search terms you want to be found for. Make sure to search for those terms in Google yourself. What results are there already? Who will be your online competitors for these search terms? What can you do to stand out from these results? LSI is just a fancy way of saying that Google understands when other phrases match the central keyword. So, if we were talking something like make money fast we could also use phrases like generate cash quickly, which is the same thing effectively. Prevent duplicate content. Don’t confuse Google with almost similar pages. Those serve no one. Stick to these good practices and you’ll be on your way to free traffic.